This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Please review the attached letter signed by 23 members of the LAUSD Parent Advisory Committee and the LAUSD District English Learner Advisory Committee, all of whom have been involved with the "review and comment" process for the 2014-15 draft LCAP. Kindly respond at your earliest opportunity.

You may reply to this e-mail address or, if you wish, Ms. Lagrosa has additional contact information for our members.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

If there are forty elected and seven appointed Parent Advisory Council members, the twenty-three signers above are one short of a majority. The prohibition against internal discussion and sharing of contact information leads me to believe that this letter would probably represent a majority opinion iftransparency, accountability and (gosh forbid!) democracy were allowed to prevail.

I have always been told that Roberts’ Rules of Order govern meetings in the absence of Bylaws. And I do believe that the Parent Advisory Council – comprised of elected and appointed representatives convened under the Brown Act to function as a state mandated advisory committee per state law and District policy qualifies as a local legislative body, not staff-supervised a District committee.

This is not a student committee deciding how to spend the decoration money for the spring dance …it is a legally mandated advisory committee of parents and stakeholders established in state law to advise the Board of Education on the expenditure of billions of dollars.

2 comments:

IANAL, but someone sent me a copy of the Tulare County Counsel opus titled "Open Meeting Requirements For Public Boards" dated July 2013.

Page 13 has the following:

The Act does not apply to a created ad hoc committee or other subsidiary body that is charged with a specific task for a limited period of time and that is composed solely of less than a quorum of members of the governing body.13 The existence of such a committee is “temporary” to serve a single or limited purpose.

and

School site councils, and certain advisory committees and committees formed because of federal funding requirements are exempt from the Brown Act. Nevertheless, such bodies must comply with similar but less formal notice and open meeting requirements.

The PAC was created to satisfy the Ed Code, but it does not have any elected official in it. It is all parent volunteers. And their product was not an "authentic" product but a homogenized, tasteless, and odorless, mush created by District staff. How could the PAC be held to the Brown Act when it did not even create its own product?

This is why I have long believed and held the position that this LCAP PAC should be the District Advisory Council (DAC). The DAC already has bylaws and is self-governing. It meets regularly and has been in the business of drafting, editing, reviewing, and monitoring school/district plans and budgets for years (in some capacity as it probably varies district to district). Districts should be using the DAC as the 2nd PAC and not creating ad hoc groups that they control and call parent engagement. What is going on now is a guise. What is the LAUSD DAC position in all this?